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Muscle Building and BodybuildingTopics related to muscle building, bodybuilding, including training and fullbody workouts. If you are looking for great advice on gaining muscle this forum is for you.

Bodypart split training (the stuff you read about in magazines where you do a different body part every day) became popular when big name bodybuilders started talking about their routines. Only problem is, these guys are juiced to the gills. Steroids change how your body responds, and therefore how you train changes. And even many of the top name bodybuilders actually train certain bodyparts multiple times per week.

Natural athletes have to go about things differently. You want to maximize your natural hormone production. The way to do this is to place as much resistance as possible on the biggest muscles of your body. The way to do THAT is through heavy compound movements. Squats, deadlifts, bench, rows, pullups, overhead press. Think squats and deadlifts combined with any movement where you move a barbell closer to or farther away from your body.

These movements will force your body to adapt by releasing a crap load of testosterone. You'll get bigger and stronger, and testosterone also keeps you lean even when you eat more food.

Conversely, if you focus on isolation movements you won't force your body to get stronger. You'll remain weak and small and die alone.

I'm sorry. I'm watching metalocolypse and feeling very brutal at the moment.

I heard that if you are a teen ( I am 16), you should stick to exercises that are compound. Do you agree with this and if so what is the reasoning behind it?

One way of looking at it this in terms of bang-per-buck. You could spend an hour in the gym doing laterals, three types of curls and tricep pushdowns. However, in this scenario, you've only worked perhaps 5% of your overall skeletal muscle mass. There just isn't that much potential for growth. The same workout spent -for example - squatting, chinning and overhead pressing might work 75% of your overall muscle mass.

The second option is therefore a more productive way to spend an hour's gym time and offers more potential for stimulating a large number of muscle fibres.

The simple fact is that compuond lifts coupeled with a solid diet will result in greater mass ( and strength) gains than isolation lifts. As everyone else has said- stick with presses, deads, squats, OHP's, dips and the sort until you have achieved a solid foundation. Most natural athletes will not benefit from high volume, single body part splits and / or loads of isolation exercises.

Want Proof? I refer you to many of the guys and gals on this forum as well as big names such as - Reg Park, Arnold, (who followed Park's methods to get big and strong) Franco Columbo ,Bertelli Fox,Mark Rippetoe, John MaCallum, Randall Strossen and the list goes on and on.

But please remember you gotta lift big, eat big and sleep big to get big.... do not alter the formula and you will do fine. oh yeah, and bacon!!! Goood luck and happy lifting.